Chapter 12

"You see, I loved David almost from the first--I mean from the beginning of my University work. The first time I saw him crossing the campus he held my attention. There was no one else in the least like him, so vivid, so exotic, so almost fierce. When I found out who he was, I confess that I directed my studies so that I should work with him. Not that I really expected to know him personally, but I wanted to be near him and have him enlarge life for me. I felt that it would take on new meanings if I could only hear his interpretations of it."

Kate shivered with sympathy at the woman's passion, and something like envy stirred in her. Here was a world of delight and torment of which she knew nothing, and beside it her own existence, restless and eager though it had been, seemed a meager affair.

"Well, the idea burned in me for months and years. But I hid it. No one guessed anything about it. Certainly David knew nothing of it. Then, when I was beginning on my graduate work, I was with him daily. But he never seemed to see me--he saw only my work, and he seldom praised that. He expected it to be well done. As for me, I was satisfied. The mere fact that we were comrades, forced to think of the same matters several hours of each day, contented me. I couldn't imagine what life would be away from him; and I was afraid to think of him in relation to myself."

"Afraid?"

"Afraid--I mean just that. I knew others thought him a genius in relation to his work. But I knew he was a genius in regard to life. I felt sure that, if he turned that intensity of his upon life instead of upon science, he would be a destructive force--a high explosive. This idea of mine was confirmed in time. It happened one evening when a number of us were over in the Scammon Garden listening to the out-of-door players. I grew tired of sitting and slipped from my seat to wander about a little in the darkness. I had reached the very outer edge of seats and was standing there enjoying the garden, when I overheard two persons talking together. A man said: 'Fulham will go far if he doesn't meet a woman.' 'Nonsense,' the woman said; 'he's an anchorite.' 'An inflammatory one,' the man returned. 'Mind, I don't say he knows it. Probably he thinks he's cast for the scientific rôle to the end of his days, but I know the fellow better than he does himself. I tell you, if a woman of power gets hold of him, he'll be as drunk as Abélard with the madness of it. Over in Europe they allow for that sort of thing. They let a man make an art of loving. Here they insist that it shall be incidental. But Fulham won't care about conventionalities if the idea ever grips him. He's born for love, and it's a lucky thing for the University that he hasn't found it out.' 'We ought to plan a sane and reasonable marriage for him,' said the woman. 'Wouldn't that be a good compromise?' 'It would be his salvation,' the man said."

Honora poured the words out with such rapidity that Kate hardly could follow her.

"How you remember it all!" broke in Kate.

"If I remember anything, wouldn't it be that? As I say, it confirmed me in what I already had guessed. I felt fierce to protect him. My jealousy was awake in me. I watched him more closely than ever. His daring in the laboratory grew daily. He talked openly about matters that other men were hardly daring to dream of, and his brain seemed to expand every day like some strange plant under calcium rays. I thought what a frightful loss to science it would be if the wilder qualities of his nature got the upper hand, and I wondered how I could endure it if--"

She drew herself up with a horror of realization. The thing that so long ago she had thought she could not endure was at last upon her! Her teeth began to chatter again, and her hands, which had been clasped, to twist themselves with the writhing motion of the mentally distraught.

"Go on!" commanded Kate. "What happened next?"

"I let him love me!"

"I thought you said he hadn't noticed you."

"He hadn't; and I didn't talk with him more than usual or coquette with him. But I let down the barriers in my mind. I never had been ashamed of loving him, but now I willed my love to stream out toward him like--like banners of light. If I had called him aloud, he couldn't have answered more quickly. He turned toward me, and I saw all his being set my way. Oh, it was like a transfiguration! Then, as soon as ever I saw that, I began holding him steady. I let him feel that we were to keep on working side by side, quietly using and increasing our knowledge. I made him scourge his love back; I made him keep his mind uppermost; I saved him from himself."

"Oh, Honora! And then you were married?"

"And then we were married. You remember how sudden it was, and how wonderful; but not wonderful in the way it might have been. I kept guard over myself. I wouldn't wear becoming dresses; I wouldn't even let him dream what I really was like--wouldn't let him see me with my hair down because I knew it was beautiful. I combed it plainly and dressed like a nurse or a nun, and every day I went to the laboratory with him and kept him at his work. He had got hold of this dazzling idea of the extraneous development of life, and he set himself to prove it. I worked early and late to help him. I let him go out and meet people and reap honors, and I stayed and did the drudgery. But don't imagine I was a martyr. I liked it. I belonged to him. It was my honor and delight to work for him. I wanted him to have all of the credit. The more important the result, the more satisfaction I should have in proclaiming him the victor. I was really at the old business of woman, subordinating myself to a man I loved. But I was doing it in a new way, do you see? I was setting aside the privilege of my womanhood for him, refraining from making any merely feminine appeal. You remember hearing Dr. von Shierbrand say there was but one way woman should serve man--the way in which Marguerite served Faust? It made me laugh. I knew a harder road than that to walk--a road of more complete abnegation."

"But the babies came."

"Yes, the babies came. I was afraid even to let him be as happy in them as he wanted to be. I held him away. I wouldn't let him dwell on the thought of me as the mother of those darlings. I dared not even be as happy myself as I wished, but I had secret joys that I told him nothing about, because I was saving him for himself and his work. But at what a cost, Kate!"

"Honora, it was sacrilegious!"

Honora leaped to her feet again.

"Yes, yes," she cried, "it was. And now all has happened according to prophecy, and he's gone with this woman! He thinks she's his mate, but, I--I was his mate. And I defrauded him. So now he's taken her because she was kind, because she loved him, because--she was beautiful!"

"She looks like you."

"Don't I know it? It's my beauty that he's gone away with--the beauty I wouldn't let him see. Of course, he doesn't realize it. He only knows life cheated him, and now he's trying to make up to himself for what he's lost."

"Oh, can you excuse him like that?"

The daylight was hardening, and it threw Honora's drawn face into repellent relief.

"I don't excuse him at all!" she said. "I condemn him! I condemn him! With all his intellect, to be such a fool! And to be so cruel--so hideously cruel!"

But she checked herself sharply. She looked around her with eyes that seemed to take in things visible and invisible--all that had been enacted in that curious room, all the paraphernalia, all the significance of those uncompleted, important experiments. Then suddenly her face paled and yet burned with light.

"But I know a great revenge," she said. "I know a revenge that will break his heart!"

"Don't say things like that," begged Kate. "I don't recognize you when you're like that."

"When you hear what the revenge is, you will," said Honora proudly.

"We're going now," Kate told her with maternal decision. "Here's your coat."

"Home?" She began trembling again and the haunted look crept back into her eyes.

Kate paid no heed. She marched Honora swiftly along the awakened streets and into the bereaved house, past the desecrated chamber where David's bed stood beside his wife's, up to Kate's quiet chamber. Honora stretched herself out with an almost moribund gesture. Then the weight of her sorrow covered her like a blanket. She slept the strange deep sleep of those who dare not face the waking truth.

XVII

Kate, who _was_ facing it, telegraphed to Karl Wander. It was all she could think of to do.

"Can you come?" she asked. "David Fulham has gone away with Mary Morrison. Honora needs you. You are the cousin of both women. Thought I had better turn to you." She was brutally frank, but it never occurred to her to mince matters there. However, where the public was concerned, her policy was one of secrecy. She called, for example, on the President of the University, who already knew the whole story.

"Can't we keep it from being blazoned abroad?" she appealed to him. "Mrs. Fulham will suffer more if he has to undergo public shame than she possibly could suffer from her own desertion. She's tragically angry, but that wouldn't keep her from wanting to protect him. We must try to prevent public exposure. It will save her the worst of torments." She brooded sadly over the idea, her aspect broken and pathetic.

The President looked at her kindly.

"Did she say so?"

"Oh, she didn't need to say so!" cried Kate. "Any one would know that."

"You mean, any good woman would know that. Of course, I can give it out that Fulham has been called abroad suddenly, but it places me in a bad position. I don't feel very much like lying for him, and I shan't be thought any too well of if I'm found out. I should like to place myself on record as befriending Mrs. Fulham, not her husband."

"But don't you see that you are befriending her when you shield him?"

"Woman's logic," said the President. "It has too many turnings for my feeble masculine intellect. But I've great confidence in you, Miss Barrington. You seem to be rather a specialist in domestic relations. If you say Mrs. Fulham will be happier for having me bathe neck-deep in lies, I suppose I shall have to oblige you. Shall it be the lie circumstantial? Do you wish to specify the laboratory to which he has gone?"

Kate blushed with sudden contrition.

"Oh, I'll not ask you to do it!" she cried. "Truth is best, of course. I'm not naturally a trimmer and a compromiser--but, poor Honora! I pity her so!"

Her lips quivered like a child's and the tears stood in her eyes. She had arisen to go and the President shook hands with her without making any promise. However the next day a paragraph appeared in the University Daily to the effect that Professor Fulham had been called to France upon important laboratory matters.

At the Caravansary they had scented tragedy, and Kate faced them with the paragraph. She laid a marked copy of the paper at each place, and when all were assembled, she called attention to it. They looked at her with questioning eyes.

"Of course," said Dr. von Shierbrand, flicking his mustache, "this isn't true, Miss Barrington."

"No," said Kate, and faced them with her chin tilted high.

"But you wish us to pretend to believe it?"

"If you please, dear friends," Kate pleaded.

"We shall say that Fulham is in France! And what are we to say about Miss Morrison?"

"Who will inquire? If any one should, say that a friend desired her as a traveling companion."

"Nothing," said Von Shierbrand, "is easier for me than truth."

"Please don't be witty," cried Kate testily, "and don't sneer. Remember that nothing is so terrible as temptation. I'm sure I see proof of that every day among my poor people. After all, doesn't the real surprise lie in the number that resist it?"

"I beg your pardon," said the young German gently. "I shall not sneer. I shall not even be witty. I'm on your side,--that is to say, on Mrs. Fulham's side,--and I'll say anything you want me to say."

"I beg you all," replied Kate, sweeping the table with an imploring glance, "to say as little as possible. Be matter-of-fact if any one questions you. And, whatever you do, shield Honora."

They gave their affirmation solemnly, and the next day Honora appeared among them, pallid and courageous. They were simple folk for all of their learning. Sorrow was sorrow to them. Honora was widowed by an accident more terrible than death. No mockery, no affected solicitude detracted from the efficacy of their sympathy. If they saw torments of jealousy in this betrayed woman's eyes, they averted their gaze; if they saw shame, they gave it other interpretations. Moreover, Kate was constantly beside her, eagle-keen for slight or neglect. Her fierce fealty guarded the stricken woman on every side. She had the imposing piano which Mary had rented carted back to the warehouse to lie in deserved silence with Mary's seductive harmonies choked in its recording fibre; she stripped from their poles the curtains Mary had hung at the drawing-room windows and burned them in the furnace; the miniatures, the plaster casts, all the artistic rubbish which Mary's exuberance had impelled her to collect, were tossed out for the waste wagons to cart away. The coquetry of the room gave way to its old-time austerity; once more Honora's room possessed itself.

* * * * *

A wire came from Karl Wander addressed to Kate.

"Fractured leg. Can't go to you. Honora and the children must come here at once. Have written."

That seemed to give Honora a certain repose--it was at least a spar to which to cling. With Kate's help she got over to the laboratory and put the finishing touches on things there. The President detailed two of Fulham's most devoted disciples to make a record of their professor's experiments.

"Fulham shall have full credit," the President assured Honora, calling on her and comforting her in the way in which he perceived she needed comfort. "He shall have credit for everything."

"He should have the Norden prize," Honora cried, her hot eyes blazing above her hectic cheeks. "I want him to have the prize, and I want to be the means of getting it for him. I told Miss Barrington I meant to have my revenge, and that's it. How can he stand it to know he ruined my life and that I got the prize for him? A generous man would find that torture! You understand, I'm willing to torture him--in that way. He's subtle enough to feel the sting of it."

The President looked at her compassionately.

"It's a noble revenge--and a poignant one," he agreed.

"It's not noble," repudiated Honora. "It's terrible. For he'll remember who did the work."

But shame overtook her and she sobbed deeply and rendingly. And the President, who had thought of himself as a mild man, left the house regretting that duels were out of fashion.

* * * * *

Then the letter came from the West. Kate carried it up to Honora, who was in her room crouched before the window, peering out at the early summer cityscape with eyes which tried in vain to observe the passing motors, and the people hastening along the Plaisance, but which registered little.

"Your cousin's letter, woman, dear," announced Kate.

Honora looked up quickly, her vagueness momentarily dissipated. Kate always had noticed that Wander's name had power to claim Honora's interest. He could make folk listen, even though he spoke by letter. She felt, herself, that whatever he said, she would listen to.

Honora tore open the envelope with untidy eagerness, and after she had read the letter she handed it silently to Kate. It ran thus:--

"COUSIN HONORA, MY DEAR AND PRIZED:--

"Rather a knock-out blow, eh? I shan't waste my time in telling you how I feel about it. If you want me to follow David and kill him, I will--as soon as this damned leg gets well. Not that the job appeals to me. I'm sensitive about family honor, but killing D. won't mend things. As I spell the matter out, there was a blunder somewhere. _Perhaps you know where it was_.

"Of course you feel as if you'd gone into bankruptcy. Women invest in happiness as men do in property, and to 'go broke' the way you have is disconcerting. It would overwhelm some women; but it won't you--not if you're the same Honora I played with when I was a boy. You had pluck for two of us trousered animals--were the best of the lot. I want you to come here and stake out a new claim. You may get to be a millionaire yet--in good luck and happiness, I mean.

"I'm taking it for granted that you and the babies will soon be on your way to me, and I'm putting everything in readiness. The fire is laid, the cupboard stored, the latchstring is hanging where you'll see it as you cross the state line.

"You understand I'm being selfish in this. I not only want, but I need, you. You always seemed more like a sister than a cousin to me, and to have you come here and make a home out of my house seems too good to be true.

"There are a lot of things to be learned out here, but I'll not give them a name. All I can say is, living with these mountains makes you different. They're like men and women, I take it. (The mountains, I mean.) The more they are ravaged by internal fires and scoured by snow-slides, the more interesting they become.

"Then it's so still it gives you a chance to think, and by the time you've had a good bout of it, you find out what is really important and what isn't. You'll understand after you've been here awhile.

"I mean what I say, Honora. I want you and the babies. Come ahead. Don't think. Work--pack--and get out here where Time can have a chance at your wounds.

"Am I making you understand how I feel for you? I guess you know your old playmate and coz,

"KARL WANDER.

"P.S. My dried-up old bach heart jumps at the thought of having the kiddies in the house. I'll bet they're wonders."

There was an inclosure for Kate. It read:--

"MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:--

"I see that you're one of the folk who can be counted on. You help Honora out of this and then tell me what I can do for you. I'd get to her some way even with this miserable plaster-of-Paris leg of mine if you weren't there. But I know you'll play the cards right. Can't you come with her and stay with her awhile till she's more used to the change? You'd be as welcome as sunlight. But I don't even need to say that. I saw you only a moment, yet I think you know that I'd count it a rich day if I could see you again. You are one of those who understand a thing without having it bellowed by megaphone.

"Don't mind my emphatic English. I'm upset. I feel like murdering a man, and the sensation isn't pleasant. Using language is too common out here to attract attention--even on the part of the man who uses it. Oh, my poor Honora! Look after her, Miss Barrington, and add all my pity and love to your own. It will make quite a sum. Yours faithfully,

"KARL WANDER."

"He wrote to you, too?" inquired Honora when Kate had perused her note.

"Yes, begging me to hasten you on your way."

"Shall I go?"

"What else offers?"

"Nothing," said Honora in her dead voice. "If I kept a diary, I would be like that sad king of France who recorded '_Rien_' each day."

Kate made a practical answer.

"We must pack," she said.

"But the house--"

"Let it stand empty if the owner can't find a tenant. Pay your rent till he does, if that's in the contract. What difference does all that make? Get out where you'll have a chance to recuperate."

"Oh, Kate, do you think I ever shall? How does a person recuperate from shame?"

"There isn't really any shame to you in what others do," Kate said.

"But you--you'll have to go somewhere."

"So I shall. Don't worry about me. I shall take good care of myself."

Honora looked about her with the face of a spent runner.

"I don't see how I'm going to go through with it all," she said, shuddering.

So Kate found packers and movers and the breaking-up of the home was begun. It was an ordeal--even a greater ordeal than they had thought it would be. Every one who knew Honora had supposed that she cared more for the laboratory than for her home, but when the packers came and tore the pictures from the walls, it might have been her heart-strings that were severed.

Just before the last things were taken out, Kate found her in an agony of weeping on David's bed, which stood with an appalling emptiness beside Honora's. Honora always had wakened first in the morning, Kate knew, and now she guessed at the memories that wrung that great, self-obliterating creature, writhing there under her torment. How often she must have raised herself on her arm and looked over at her man, so handsome, so strong, so completely, as she supposed, her own, and called to him, summoning him to another day's work at the great task they had undertaken for themselves. She had planned to be a wife upon an heroic model, and he had wanted mere blitheness, mere feminine allure. Then, after all, as it turned out, here at hand were all the little qualities, he had desired, like violets hidden beneath their foliage.

Kate thought she never had seen anything more feminine than Honora, shivering over the breaking-tip of the linen-closet, where her housewifely stores were kept.

"I don't suppose you can understand, dear," she moaned to Kate. "But it's a sort of symbol--a linen-closet is. See, I hemmed all these things with my own hands before I was married, and embroidered the initials!"

How could any one have imagined that the masculine traits in her were getting the upper hand! She grew more feminine every hour. There was an increasing rhythm in her movements--a certain rich solemnity like that of Niobe or Hermione. Her red-brown hair tumbled about her face and festooned her statuesque shoulders. The severity of her usual attire gave place to a negligence which enhanced her picturesqueness, and the heaving of her troubled bosom, the lifting of her wistful eyes gave her a tenderer beauty than she ever had had before. She was passionate enough now to have suited even that avid man who had proved himself so delinquent.

"If only David could have seen her like this!" mused Kate. "His 'Blue-eyed One' would have seemed tepid in comparison. To think she submerged her splendor to so little purpose!"

She wondered if Honora knew how right Karl Wander had been in saying that some one had blundered, and if she had gained so much enlightenment that she could see that it was herself who had done so. She had renounced the mistress qualities which the successful wife requires to supplement her wifely character, and she had learned too late that love must have other elements than the rigidly sensible ones.

Honora was turning to the little girls now with a fierce sense of maternal possession. She performed personal services for them. She held them in her arms at twilight and breathed in their personality as if it were the one anaesthetic that could make her oblivious to her pain.

Kate hardly could keep from crying out:--

"Too late! Too late!"

There was a bleak, attic-like room at the Caravansary, airy enough, and glimpsing the lake from its eastern window, which Kate took temporarily for her abiding-place. She had her things moved over there and camped amid the chaos till Honora should be gone.

The day came when the two women, with the little girls, stood on the porch of the house which had proved so ineffective a home. Kate turned the key.

"I hope never to come back to Chicago, Kate," Honora said, lifting her ravaged face toward the staring blankness of the windows. "I'm not brave enough."

"Not foolish enough, you mean," corrected Kate. "Hold tight to the girlies, Honora, and you'll come out all right."